Silicon process technology continues to shrink the feature size of devices causing more process variation. As a result, charged based memory storage technologies, such as dynamic random access memory (DRAM), may no longer scale with successive technology generations.
Phase change memory (PCM) is a potential replacement for DRAM in computers and other digital devices. Like other non-volatile memories, PCM has a limited lifetime or durability. Typically, over time, one or more cells of the blocks of a PCM device may become inoperable and can no longer be reliably written to. Other types of memory may have similar issues.